What is labor? How does it shape the body’s experience of language, the sensory, the temporal? In this course, students will delve into and create works of prose that investigate, dismantle, and reimagine the act and cost of labor and its impact on beinghood, belonging, and desire. Through a diverse offering of readings, generative assignments, and craft-focused workshops, students will explore how the confrontation of labor through prose can simultaneously capture the personal as well as the universal. This course will include literary, cinematic, and art-based texts that embody, depict, and/or reimagine the narrative implications of laboring bodies in addition to works that illustrate the potential of crafting stories that fall outside of the binary (in terms of identity, form, and aesthetic). Students will engage with works by Renne Gladman, Simone Weil, Audre Lorde, Halle Butler, Otessa Moshfegh, Mara Faye Lethem, Brandon Taylor, Nicola Dinan, Zinzi Clemmons, Julio Torres, Jordan Harrison, Shara Worden, and others.